Their own way
You could fill a library with lurid stories from Fleetwood Mac’s past, but everything you need to know is in the 12 songs of Rumours.
AH, YES, 1977. I remember it as if it was yesterday. It was a year of great rejoicing among the old and tired, due to the launch of the new National Superannuation Scheme, but, elsewhere, political tensions ran high. That old bully Muldoon was still in power, presiding over the shameful dawn raids in which hundreds of Polynesian ‘‘overstayers’’ were deported, and a group of Ngati Whatua was ensconced at Bastion Point, protesting government inaction over land claims. Sleeping Dogs was screening in our cinemas, a movie that imagined Aotearoa as a police state, complete with bombings, torture, and reluctant revolutionary Sam Neill hooning around in the Coromandel bush.
I, meanwhile, was marinating in male hormones in Whanganui, riding the rapids of puberty while listening to a steady soundtrack of David Bowie, The Commodores, and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours.
The latter was re-released this week in a variety of deluxe 35th anniversary editions, and listening to it again after all these years is like turning on a tap marked ‘‘nostalgia’’. From the very first note of Second Hand News, memories gush forth; my head swims with images of summer barbecues, furtive beer drinking at Lake Wiritoa, sociopathic teachers and hot girls from my class doing PE in rompers.
When Rumours first came out, I’d just turned 16 and Stevie Nicks was a powerful object of desire; a Californian hippie witch with ragged hems and a look in her eyes that suggested she wanted me badly. Or so I thought at the time. I talked to her in 2009, and she sounded surprisingly aloof, given how much she’d fancied me back in ‘77.
‘‘Those 12 songs came out of a very dark time’’ she said when I asked about Rumours, her voice every bit as husky and nasal as you’d expect. ‘‘We were telling stories everybody could relate to, so people carried those songs around like their own little mantras.’’
And what peculiar little musical mantras they were: Melodically indelible, hooky as a pirate captain, but bitter as vinegar. It was the sound of pain polished to a high gloss under the unforgiving LA sun, with lyrics that touched on the defining themes of the era – the drugs, the sexual shenanigans, the emotional carelessness, the hippie dream beginning to curdle and sour.
And what better band to tell such stories? Even within the notoriously dramatic world of rock’n’roll, Fleetwood Mac’s career was notable for its lack of restraint. The band’s history resembles a soft-rock Spinal Tap, replete with madness and religious cults, bogus touring bands, bad acid, bankruptcy, seizures, suicide, clandestine rooting, industrial strength bitchiness, oceans of alcohol and blizzards of cocaine.
Indeed, you could fill a library with lurid stories from this band’s past, but, really, everything you